Like the fiery hand of God

Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim on Unsplash

Long-time readers will likely recall a few times when I expressed my overall foreign policy strategy, when it comes to military use, as being slow to anger, but when that point is reached, we should descend upon our enemies like the fiery hand of God.

It’s basically a superpower’s version of the Tao of Dalton from the original Roadhouse. “Be nice until it’s time to not be nice.”

The reason I bring this up is that, over the weekend, we saw our armed forces launch a series of attacks on Iran that resulted in the deaths of pretty much everyone in charge there.

Normally, this is the kind of thing that I’m going to pop off about on Twitter and say we really don’t need to be doing this.

I won’t this time, though.

Why? Because we’ve been slow to anger with Iran.

While we’ve never been best buddies with Iran since they deposed the Shah, I get why they were displeased with him. Unfortunately, rather than just overthrowing him, they took Americans hostage and held them for 444 days.

Had that been the end of it, we could have moved past it. That was 1981, after all.

The problem is that Iran has spent the last four and a half decades making damn sure we couldn’t move past it. Rather than focusing on their economy, which was fine under the Shah but has been anemic under the Islamist regime, they funded every terrorist group with an ax to grind.

From the Marine barracks attack in Beirut to the Houthis in 2025 and almost every point in between, Iran has supported Islamic terrorism against the entire world. They’ve had their fingers in almost every major attack you can think of, including 9/11.

And, for the most part, we’ve tried to be nice. Oh, we’ve played some hardball here and there, but we also didn’t make a huge thing over how evil a regime they were.

They oppress their own people—something the mainstream media acted like wasn’t a possibility as the Islamic revolution was taking place there, it should be noted—and lay the seeds of discord throughout the world, and we’ve largely left them alone.

Sure, there was Operation Praying Mantis, where we gutted their navy in the span of just a few hours, but that was an attempt at a proportional response mixed with the US Navy defending itself. The fact that Iran’s navy sucks at war wasn’t our fault.

But when the operation was over, we were done.

Over the last few weeks, Iran has not just spurned every proposal to stop their nuclear program—and don’t believe the butt-munches who say Obama had already stopped that. He hadn’t—but they also slaughtered their own people who had the nerve to want to be free.

A nuclear Iran simply can’t happen, if for no other reason than Iran would gladly give nukes to any terrorist organization that wanted to use one.

We were slow to anger, so now it’s time to descend upon our enemy like the fiery hand of God.

The problem is, Trump isn’t interested in doing that. He wants to leave a remnant of the current regime in place, much like he did in Venezuela following the Maduro raid.

But as bad as the Venezuelan regime is, it doesn’t hold a candle to Iran. For once, I’m seeing a situation where boots on the ground are warranted, and we should rip Iran’s ruling power to shreds, leaving a scar on the Persian psyche that will never be repaired, even as we step aside in short order to allow the pro-democracy crowd to build their own nation from the ashes.

Of course, I think plan “A” should be that we should put guns in their hands and allow them to fight for their own liberty, with American air cover destroying anything that would threaten them. Let’s not risk American lives any more than we have to.

Yet this is a case where I can’t muster any outrage over the attack. Iran is our enemy. They’ve even declared war on us. They’ve funded groups that want to destroy our entire nation and way of life. They are hostile to everything we stand for, which is bad enough, but unlike those who just seethe over who we are, pop off with some words, then do nothing, Iran has been involved in the deaths of an untold number of American lives via their terrorist proxies.

Out there, some people are saying that this isn’t “America First” and that Trump has overstepped his stated principles of being about America over the rest of the world.

Here, I disagree.

Being America First must also mean protecting this nation from threats. Iran is a big threat. If they’re allowed to stand back up as they were, they’ll continue being a threat.

So, bring them to their knees. Obliterate any remnant of the Islamic revolution in 1979. Annihilate the entire regime until the only memorial to it is smoking craters and less-than-fond memories.

I don’t want war. I don’t like it as it’s largely a waste of time, money, resources, and most importantly, lives.

But suffering someone to remain a threat, one that can and will hurt you over and over again, is foolish in my book.

Trump should take this as far as he can and let it serve as a warning to the rest of the world. We aren’t interested in taking over territory or destroying nations over perceived slights.

But if you mess with us, we will mess with you to such a degree that you will never recover.

We have nukes, but we don’t need them because we’re just that fucking good at war.

Last year, The Atlantic published a piece about the rise of the “brutal American.”

I responded with a column about how many of the world’s problems have been because we’ve never been the brutal American like we probably should have.

No, I don’t want war.

But if we’re going to keep feeling Iran’s attempt to kill us by a thousand cuts, let’s show them that it’s far more efficient to use a few really big cuts to do the job once and for all.

And if it teaches the rest of the world to chill the hell out with us, so much the better.

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